Hello all,
My first post in years (used to have another account here way back in the day). I'm working on getting megasquirt set up in my '75 Turbo Z, and I've run into a bit of a snag. I got the engine to idle, and I got it running, and then I locked the dizzy and setup MS to drive the coil directly. I went to setup the base timing, and discovered that the engine runs with the timing set somewhere around 40º or 50º BTDC (checked with timing light) at idle. If I were to shift the dizzy to get that closer to 10º, the engine will run more and more poorly until it gets to around 20º, and then it will die. Is it possible that my crank pulley isn't on correctly?
I got MS to drive the ignition, but I currently have it setup in MegaTune to fire at a fixed 10º, while in reality the timing light shows it firing around 50º. It was running smoothly though, so I'm pretty confused.
I say "was", because the last time I went to start it up it started spitting huge plumes of white smoke out the tail pipe (I'm talking MASSIVE quantities of smoke). The EGR was sitting somewhere around 15.8 or wherever my idle had been, my CLT was about 87ºC, which was also normal. The engine still sounded fine, was running fine, was even revving up fine. It only seemed to be smoking at idle. I pulled a plug, and it looked good. I'll do a compression check in the morning. Is it quite likely that my head gasket is blown (and how did that happen while the engine was under no load?), or is it possible that I busted a turbo seal or something of that sort? I suppose the smoke could've been blue-ish. It's hard to tell at night.
Please excuse my noob-ish questions. I've been learning so much over the past week, but I've still got a ways to go.
cheers,
-kito